Secular Interpretation of Christian
Concepts
The following is part of a longer essay which I
wrote about 1995. It is a secular
article which interprets various prominent Christian concepts in secular
language.
Trying to Be Fully Human
Accepting
Reality
Recall the parable which described humans as
caught in the jaws of GOD. Each of the
three responses described above involves trying to reduce the pressure by
denying part of the reality of being human.
When we humans try to be GOD, we try to deny that there are limitations
which can't be overcome. When we try to
be like other animals, we try to refuse to use our gift of being able to
dream. When we try to compromise, we try
to know when to dream and when not to, with the result that we don't take our
dreams seriously. We only pretend to
dream. Since we don't really test
reality by pushing hard to achieve our dreams, we often fail to learn about
reality.
When we humans try to be fully human, we
recognize that we are in the jaws and cannot escape without losing our
humanness. We recognize the reality of
being human. We know that we can dream
and that we face limitations to our dreams.
We recognize that to be human is to experience the pressure of limited
dreams. But unlike the drivers, victims
and compromisers, we value trying to be fully human more than we value trying
to reduce the pressure. (Bultman)
Life
is a Glorious Struggle
Our lives are a glorious struggle; glorious
because unlike other animals we can dream, a struggle because unlike GOD we do
not have ultimate control. Even if we
achieve our dreams, we cannot rest on our laurels. If we do not create new dreams and struggle
to achieve them, we are no different from other animals. Only by continually dreaming and struggling
do we maximally use our universal and unique human gifts.
We view our human life as a glorious
struggle. It is glorious because unlike
other animals, we can dream. It is a
struggle because not being all powerful like GOD, we can not control the fulfillment
of our dreams. We are willing to pay the
price of struggle in order to use our gift of humanness.
Using
All of Our Gifts
We recognize that our human life is poured out
and broken. Our life is a stream of
consciousness that can’t be stopped. It just
keeps moving along. Our life is never exactly
what we want it to be. It is always
broken and blemished. We can either use
the life that we have or we will lose it. We recognize that our human life is a
gift, see it as a valuable gift and want to use it.
Christians often use communion as a way to
symbolize that they can live a poured-out and broken life. Pouring the wine symbolizes our poured-out
life. We drink the wine to indicate that
we can live a poured-out life. Breaking
the bread symbolizes that our life is broken.
Eating the bread indicates that we can live a broken life.
When we want to reach our potential, we try to
use all of our gifts. We dream, plan,
struggle, feel and learn. We create many
stories about our past, present and future.
We act according to these stories, experience the intrusions of reality
and recreate our stories to reflect our new understandings of possibilities and
limits. Our stories include our
understanding of ourselves as social animals.
We dream of a good household, neighborhood, community, society and
world. Our social plans include rights
and responsibilities. We try to be a
responsible member of our social groupings.
We
are Free to Decide and Must Decide
Humans always have alternative choices. We may not like any alternative. Or we may like several exclusive
alternatives. We may have to choose
among rights or among wrongs. To make a decision
may be painful. But we are always free
to decide among the alternatives which are available.
At each moment, we are not only free to decide,
we must decide. We do decide. We do this or that. We may say we do nothing, but that is a
choice. To make no conscious choice is a
decision.
The human is a social and cultural animal. Our consciousness is communicated and
learned. Culture accumulates to address
immediate and fundamental questions of the human situation. It passes and evolves from generation to
generation.
Each human becomes conscious within a cultural
milieu. Our understanding of the world
and our life is shaped by the cultural understandings of the generations before
us. These understandings are richer than
we could create by ourselves. But they
do not exhaust reality. Every human
being can and does make decisions beyond the imposition of culture and society.
Because choices are often painful, people may
try to avoid them. We may decide to be
obedient to a simple rule, a set of rules (such as the Christian bible or an
office policy manual), or to another person (such as my military superior, my
boss at work, or my spouse).
When we do this, we appear to give up our
freedom to make individual moment-by-moment decisions, both trivial and
important life and death ones. When
confronted with responsibility for the consequences of our actions, we may say
"Orders is orders.", "It's company policy, I only work here.",
or, "My parents or my spouse made me do it."
But we could at any moment decide to stop
following orders, whatever the consequences.
We are still free to decide and are responsible for our decision. There is no escape.
Many will tell us what to do with our life. But we must decide whether to follow their
urgings. We must decide what to do with
we life and ultimately, we must decide alone.
We cannot escape the jaws of aspiration and limitation. How do we decide?
Humans
Need Stories to Make Decisions
To do anything with the present moment, each
human must use our experiences, of those moments that have gone by, to build a
story about those to come and the moment that is present. Otherwise we are no
more than a rock in a stream, controlled by the forces around us. The tragedy of Alzheimer's disease is that
one loses the ability to make stories.
With no story of alternatives and principles for evaluating them, one
cannot make decisions.
Unless one builds rich and realistic stories of
the past, future and present, stories which invest the present moment with
great significance, one wastes the gift that that moment is. To be able to live each moment fully, one
must develop a comprehensive story which allows for both opportunity and obstacle,
victory and failure.
To live life fully, one must embrace each moment
in all its uniqueness, relate it to one's story and direct it in accordance
with the story. One must then release it,
free oneself from it and from the story.
Using the outcome, one must enrich and alter the story and embrace the
next moment.
Reducing
the Story to Escape
All too easily, one may retreat into a story of
moments gone by, develop elaborate stories of those to come, or try to live
only in the immediacy of the present moment.
In different ways, each of these alternatives is an attempt to escape
the crunch of aspiration and limitation.
Each reduces the extent to which we live fully and deeply.
In later essays, I will discuss ways of
building, maintaining and rebuilding stories.
These will include meditation, contemplation, reflection, action
planning and prayer.
Freedom,
Obedience and Responsibility
At every moment, each human is free to decide,
but for the decision to have meaning, we must follow it through. If we constantly change our decisions, we
have not really made any decision. We
are free, but we have not used our freedom.
To use our freedom without losing it, we must
decide out of a comprehensive story. We
must take into account the many realities, possibilities and principles to
which we are obedient. At the same time,
we maintain the freedom to act differently as these circumstances, people and
principles change. We can only be both
free and obedient by acting out of a comprehensive story. This we call responsibility. (Bonhoffer)
Faith,
Hope and Love
Our comprehensive story guides our
decisions. It also expresses our faith,
hope and love. It expresses our
understanding of the way life is and our values concerning the way life should
be. The more comprehensive our story,
the more secure the object of our faith.
If we only have faith in and care for our
canary, our responsibility is limited and our faith can easily be
destroyed. As we broaden our faith and
our care to our family, neighbors, community, the globe and all creation, our
faith becomes more secure and we increase our responsibility. We live fuller lives.
Perhaps the ultimate extension of faith and
responsibility is to GOD. To the mystery
and reality of our human experience. To
living fully. To using fully the gifts
of life, within the jaws of aspiration and limitation. To taking responsibility for using our
life. To trusting that whatever happens
during our life, we can use fully the broken poured-out life that we have.
Poverty,
Chastity and Obedience
To live fully requires discipline. It requires that we adopt a lifestyle of
poverty, chastity and obedience. When I
use these ancient religious words, I am not talking about money, sex and
slavery. Let me explain.
A lifestyle of poverty is being detached
from things which restrict our life and mission. Some people think they must have many
luxuries. Certain types of food at
certain times of the day. Some people
think they must sleep in certain types of bed during certain hours each
night. Some people can only use certain
types of toilet. They must have certain
types of house and car. They must have
certain types of people around and must avoid others.
These requirements interfere with living
fully. These people spend much of their
time meeting their many standards. They
have little time and effort for living fully and deeply. They are unable to care for many aspects of
themselves, for others and for the world.
To live fully, we must adopt a lifestyle of poverty. We must have few requirements for our own
sustenance.
A lifestyle of chastity is being true to
our life and work. It is not being
promiscuously distracted. It is choosing
and maintaining priorities. We cannot be
effective when we are doing many things at once. We must decide what is more important.
We must care for ourselves, so we are not a
burden on others, so we have the strength to care for others. We must care for others who in turn will be
able to care for others. We must decide
when to help a victim and when to change the system which produces the
victim. We must care for those who are
ready for care, rather than wasting our efforts on those who are not
ready. Jesus said, "Knock and if
there is no answer, shake the dust from your feet and move to the next door."
We must recognize that we cannot be effective
alone. We have to find others to trust
and work with. We have to trust them to
do their tasks, to save our energy for our own.
These are only a few examples of setting priorities. To live fully and deeply, we must be chaste
amidst complexity, ambiguity and temptation.
A lifestyle of obedience is being
obedient to living fully and deeply. It
is being obedient to our care for ourselves, others and all the gifts of
GOD. It is being obedient to building
our comprehensive story and deciding out of our comprehensive story.
We never fully understand the many gifts of
GOD. We never fully understand how to
live fully and deeply. Or how to care
for others and all creation. We never
fully understand our work to which we must be obedient. Our story can never be totally comprehensive
or final. We must be open to
learning. We must be humble. We must be servants.
To live fully, we must adopt the disciplined
lifestyle of poverty, chastity and obedience.
We must humbly focus upon our tasks without being distracted by personal
wants, by low priorities, or by reduced stories. We must always ask out a broad context,
"Will my next action produce spirit?"
Crucifixion
and Resurrection
Wanting to live fully and deeply, we are
impelled to build a comprehensive story.
We put our passion and faith into our story. But our story is always full of illusions. It never matches our mysterious, complex and
changing reality. To defend our story is
to render it increasingly irrelevant to reality. Increasingly our story becomes a block to our
living fully and deeply.
To live fully and deeply, we must constantly
risk our story. At each moment, we must
both use our story and leave it open to changes, both trivial and fundamental,
in the face of reality. We must be ready
to die to our story that we can find new life.
That we can be reborn to new life.
Christians symbolize this dynamic with the story of Jesus' crucifixion
and resurrection.
We must remember that three people were
crucified on that day, but only one was resurrected. To risk ourselves in thought and action is
not to guarantee new life. But new life cannot
be obtained except through risk.
The
Past is Done. The Future is Open..
We easily become bogged down in the past. Living fully, we are passionate about our
present stories and decisions. We revel
in our victories and mourn our defeats.
When the present becomes the past, we still retain our passion for
it. GOD has taken our actions and
determined what happened. We cannot
change what happened. Nothing we can do
can change the past. We can only act in
the present to affect the future. And
the future is open. Regardless of how we
got here, we can choose among many options in our present situation. Even when we are extremely disabled and
restricted in our activities, we can still dream and make many choices compared
to other animals. (Tillich)
But we often do not offer the past up to
GOD. We may try to avoid the crunch of
the present by reveling in past victories.
We may try repeat past failures, to prove that they weren't our fault. In either event, we fail to prepare to live
in the present and the future.
Confession
and Absolution
A major question is "How does one build a
rich story of the past, future and present, pour one's passion into each moment
and then immediately offer it up and switch one's passion to another
moment?" Like the football player,
how do we pour all our passion into a play, then whatever the outcome and no
matter how the game is going, pick ourself up and based on the new situation,
throw ourself into the next play?
To live fully, we must confess the past, absolve
it and move on the take responsibility for our present decisions. Through confession, we take responsibility
for our past actions and decisions.
Through absolution, we recognize that we did not have full knowledge and
control of the outcome.
Am I sure.
I'm never sure. Life is a series
of experiments. The more experiments the
better. To stick with past thoughts
without relating them to the present is to waste the present. Only by accepting the past, can we be open to
the future.
Becoming
Responsible
When we want to reach our potential, we
recognize and appreciate our sociality.
We humans are social and depend upon others to develop our full
humanness. Our greatest satisfactions
often come from interacting with others to experience their feelings, thoughts
and behavior in response to our own.
Through cooperating with others, we can dream larger dreams, understand
more of reality, make more effective plans and apply more resources to their
implementation.
We thus often dream, plan, struggle, feel and
learn cooperatively with others. We
often work cooperatively with others and seek to improve our social
skills. We come to identify with other
people. We seek their help and seek to
help them. Through using our gift of
sociality, we recognize social obligations and limits upon our behavior. We become responsible.
We recognize that our potential includes the
capacity to harm others. Our ultimate
loneliness is revealed whenever we encounter win-lose situations with other
people. When we imagine many
possibilities, we often dream selfish dreams and pursue them at the expense of
others. Being reality oriented and often
effective, the person who seeks to live fully can be extremely dangerous to
others. We are aware of our own selfish
tendencies and try to restrain them.
We dream not only of a better life. We dream of a better household, a better
community and a better world – for ourselves, our children and our grand
children. We care about other
people. When people are hurt, we try to
help them. We seek to build their
strengths and to avoid enabling their weaknesses. If we rescue someone, we free them rather
than trying to become their new controller.
We recognize that people's thoughts and actions
are affected by their social context.
When people are hurt by their social context, we try to reform the
social context. When we try to be fully
human, we become social activists. We
work for political justice, economic equity and environmental sustainability.
The major question for every person is,
"What are you doing with your life?"
More specifically, "Are you living fully and deeply?" With regard to any choice, a relevant
question is, "Will this build spirit?" These questions can often stimulate us to
take our lives seriously. They can help
us to eliminate obviously destructive choices.
But our decisions will still often be ambiguous, complex, and tough.
God, Christ and Our Holy Spirit
We can define God experientially as all that we can’t know or can’t control. Since we can’t know how we were created (due to the complexity of the river of history, we can also understand God as our creator. But we can’t understand God as perfection. If we had been present at the creation, we would have had many suggestions for improving many aspects of perfection.
We can also imagine a mythical God in more human terms as someone with which we frequently conduct conversations. This God enables us to dramatize our many experiences, reflect on them, learn from them and retain them as memories.
Jesus was a man. But Christ is a dynamic which Jesus manifested. Christ is the dynamic of challenging our stories, uncovering our illusions, and creating new stories about our reality. Through this Christ dynamic, we are constantly reborn. Without it, we increasingly die to the real world.
The Holy Spirit can be interpreted as the disciplined life style of the person who commits him/herself to living before the God of Mystery, open to rebirth through the Christ dynamic of being open to discovering our illusions and changing our understandings. The Holy Spirit includes poverty, chastity, and obedience.
In conclusion, this essay doesn’t suggest that all or most Christians interpret Christian concepts in these ways. It only suggest that Christian concepts have great appeal because they can be interpreted experientially to bear on our fundamental spiritual concerns, our concerns with how to live fully as humans.